Archive for the ‘Entrepreneurship’ Category

It’s easier to talk about statistical measurements when you speak of people as entities, but Dorsey points out that you need to really “feel their needs.”

WhatClinic is a web service that connects patients with clinics around the world who can deliver the service they need. Its founder and CEO, Caelen King says that their mission is to create a better marketplace for the benefit of patients and clinics. “It’s not for the benefit of one without the other. Balancing the two of those is the key thing.”

“A two-sided business is inherently complex to run,” says King. “If you overprioritise the person who pays you, or you lose functionality, people stop using it quickly.”

It’s important to remember that the person who uses a service for free is the product. “They consent to be your product, and things fall down if you lose the consent.”

But it’s not enough just to get buyers and sellers into a room together. “You have to facilitate,” he says. “You can serve up banner ads, and that’s fine, but you have to deliver more value.”

One way WhatClinic does this is that if a clinic doesn’t reply to a patient within 24 hours, a workflow of emails and phone calls starts, which helps to connect the two. If the clinic doesn’t respond within 48 hours, WhatClinic will suggest another clinic the patient might try. “There’s real value in it, but it’s not something we can market as a message without insulting our customers.”

That relationship has to be carefully managed because while the needs of the two groups aren’t necessarily in competition, the money and the consent come from different motivations. But, King adds, “If you understand the psychology of the user, that’s very valuable to your customer.”

Liam Ryan runs GetHealth, a graduate of NDRC’s accelerator programme LaunchPad, a product that helps people track their health and fitness goals. They’re aiming it at corporate entities, where they make a business case for reducing sick days and insurance claims.

If company employees get healthier the business runs more efficiently. But those employees have to want to use the product, so it has to have features that benefit them. Where do you start?

“We decided to sell it before we built it,” says Ryan. “For the first 3 or 4 months we just sold it, we didn’t build anything.”

Anyone with a great service can generate lots of users, but first you need to know what people will pay for.

“Jack [Dorsey] knew he got it wrong with Twitter. With Square he made sure he got his customers first.”

Ryan and his team recently went to a conference in Chicago attended by corporate wellness managers and CFOs. GetHealth wanted to get a better understanding of the pain points they could be addressing.

“[The wellness managers and CFOs] wanted to improve communication with employees about wellness initiatives, and measure the return on investment.” Isolating these pivot points helped them understand more about what the paying customers are looking for.

But how do you actually measure that return on investment?

Dorsey argues that seeing people as statistical entities misses the point, and King adds that “praying to the altar of stats” isn’t always as helpful as it seems.

“To get mathematical certainty requires massive volumes of data, unless the change is monstrously large. If you’re looking at a feature that might be 2 or 3 percent better, you need hundreds of thousands of data points to get any degree of certainty.”

WhatClinic has more than a million users a month, but it still takes weeks to test a feature, even with the scale that can help them measure with numbers.

Sometimes, he says, you still have to go with your gut. “And your gut is frequently wrong, but you have to accept that you’re making errors.”

You have to listen to your non-paying users, “You’re already listening to the other people because you’re selling to them.”

But if your gut is wrong, he points out, your users will probably let you know. “I think the users are always going to be more honest to you than the people who are paying you.”

How much does your name matter?

Any name can work if you’ve got enough money, but most people don’t have enough money, so you have to be clever. But your name isn’t as important as getting to the top of the sector you’re in, as a new thing. You need to think, what sector am I in? Can I slice it and dice it down, and define it so tightly that I’m the leading light? That’s when you come up with your tagline. Your tagline is more important than your name.

So what comes first?

Defining your sector is really everything. If you haven’t figured out your sector and why you’re unique, there’s no point in naming yourself. For example, if I’m making a game for iPad, let’s say there are 400,000 games. So I look at educational games, and there are 100,000 of those. So mine is for kids ages 9 to 12, but there are still 60,000 of those. But you choose a niche within that, so now you’ve defined your sector and framed the debate so that you’re going to win.

An interesting example of this is StoryToys,  interactive books based on Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Rather than compete in the big games sector, they’re in interactive books. If you walk into any Apple store in the world, the demo on the front of every iPad is a StoryToys interactive book. They labeled themselves as a game with reading.

It’s about making yourself rise to the top of whatever sector it is you want to dominate. Then you can go to journalists with processed stories and trend stories about that sector – nobody wants to be writing puff pieces, so you’ll actually get more publicity, too.

So basically, your tagline shows you’ve done your homework?

Yes, this three- to five-word line that tells people what sector you’re going to dominate. After that is money and talent, but that isn’t the immediate differentiator. When they go to raise money, a lot of people think that VCs are financial people. But they’re not – they’re marketeers. They want to know that you know your sector better than anyone. That’s what a great tagline tells them. But your tagline exists so that you can murder it.

Why do you need to kill it?

Your tagline is an internal metric that you should try to murder every day. Why? Because facebook had a tagline – I don’t know what it was, but they had one. What you want is to dominate your sector so much that the tagline is no longer necessary.

Your name does matter a little – you need to contextualize your name, but you really need to evolve your tagline and then, if you’re successful enough, you can kill it. If you’re still in need of a tagline after nine months, you might be failing.

So it’s more the overall approach to understanding and labeling your company?

The name isn’t that important, it’s everything around the name. I try to go with the “dyslexic K”. I stole it from Playskool and used it for Havok because I thought it was memorable and playful.

You can pick a name that evokes how you make the customer feel, or one that’s a descriptor of what you do, depending on the business. Havok’s main competitor was MathEngine, which is a really good descriptor of what the engine is. But Havok was about the effect. People wanted to feel cool.

Right now I’m helping a company now called Conker (from LaunchPad), for similar reasons. They’re in the games industry. And then you have the best name around, CoderDojo. They could have called it “computer science school”, which is what it is. But CoderDojo says, “I am The Karate Kid.” A name like that says, “How do I feel about myself when I’m using this thing?”

Do people get a little too far from sensible with names because it’s so hard to get a dot-com domain name?

People sweat the dot-com too much. The reality is that you very rarely will get stumbleupon business. People will hear about you in different ways. People misunderstand how business is won – in business-to-business you really don’t need a dot-com. You have to understand what social media and an online presence really do for you. Traffic doesn’t magically appear – you are driving people to you by pressing about 20 different levers.

What do you need to know before you name yourself?

People are very precious about the name, but your brand is more important, and your brand is how people describe you after you’ve left the room. That can be messy and you won’t be happy with it. It won’t be clean or on-message, but tough sh*t, that’s your brand, and you can’t be in every room.

It’s so much more than your name. It’s your sector, then your tagline, then your name – your name is the third most important thing with your brand.

(Hat-tip to @destraynor of well-named @Intercom for the EatMyBox tip.)

What’s the business culture like in a rural area like yours?
In terms of business, it’s a lot of retail and care work. There aren’t a lot of tech businesses. When I was in London and I said I was going back to Colwyn Bay, people said, “There’ll be nothing up there.” But I’ve been here a year now since university, I’ve set up my own business and been asked to become part of a startup. I’ve done no advertising yet, and I seem to be getting work for all sorts of things. I get out and speak to people, and I use my existing network. You can’t be lazy around here.

Are there many events?
There are a few that I’ve attended and am going to attend. There aren’t as many as there would be in Manchester, London or Birmingham, but that’s what you expect. And you have to work harder to keep your reputation high in areas like this – word will spread fast if something goes wrong.

What are some of the other challenges for startups in rural areas?
Talent is an issue, in terms of finding people who have a big enough mindset to want to make the sacrifices required to be successful in a startup. I think people who understand tech — especially in terms of online startups – people in places like London, that’s what they expect. Around here people expect you to have a “proper job”, doing something that doesn’t require as much time, or money or sacrifice. In London they’ll happily take on a role at a startup, and might worry less about finance straightaway because they’re around successful startups.

It’s a culture that breeds itself. That’s why the UK government wants to create the Silicon Roundabout, or whatever they call it, in East London – they want to replicate Silicon Valley.

What is it like to be a risk-taker in a rural area?
It doesn’t take much to be seen as “unusual” in a rural area. One of the biggest issues for me setting up my own company and creating a job for myself, was that so many people were against it. People would ask me weekly if I “had a proper job yet”. And I’m thinking, why have we as a society got to a point where we just want to work for someone else? There’s such a lack of vision and drive to be our own people.

What about events like Jelly?
I think the issue is that one event won’t change a whole mindset of an area. And when you go, if there are fewer than ten people, you have a vicious circle that people will turn up to try it out and see there aren’t many people, then never turn up again.

What can be done to help form the kind of community startups need to succeed?
People try to use a device that’s been successful in other areas, and think it will be successful for their problem. But they’re not thinking about how to develop a tool for the situation they’re in. You can’t use the same ideas you do for general business, when you’re trying to create a way for startups to thrive. Or even for people in rural areas to network and create a community more easily.

You have to change people’s mindsets. As British people we tend to be quite negative about new things, even as business people who’ve gone through hardships and difficulties to make a successful business.

Is there a design solution?
I think Inventorium are in a good position to achieve this. Jelly is one thing, but other events are needed, not just getting out of the office for the day. People have a perception of value for time, and you have to show them their time will be spent wisely if they attend. Getting business people together would hopefully push that forward.

I think perhaps in places that are more built up, you can have a bad day at the office, and you can go to the pub, and you’d be fired up again because there are people talking about exciting new ideas and ventures. Where if you went to the pub here, you’d become even more depressed about your business.

I think someone should look into what makes those built-up areas successful and see how that can be replicated for a rural area. Obviously some things won’t replicate as easily as others. You could also get more people who are big in their fields to come along and show people that big things can happen in small places. A few inspirational speakers every few months would boost a lot of morale with people who run businesses in small areas.

What advice do you have for people who want to set up a startup in a small area?
Find people that have at least a similar desire to you and are “yes” people. They won’t give you all the disadvantages, and if they do, they’ll also give you solutions. Somebody who is positive is far more helpful than somebody who is negative – even if the positive person lacks realism.

According to Harvard Business School’s Shikhar Ghosh it’s either 30-40% (if your investors lose and you liquidate), 70-80% (if you don’t see the projected return on investment) or 90-95% (if you declare and fail to meet a projection). And that’s for businesses that even get to the product stage.

According to behavioral psychologist and startup adviser Matt Wallaert , “There’s a difference between naturalistic failures that should fail because it’s not the right time or it’s a bad idea, and things that fail for other reasons.”

Why do startups fail?

Dr Johnny Ryan is a tech thinker and Chief Innovation Officer at the Irish Times. He describes working with a promising startup whose technology was revolutionary. “The technology functioned, and despite poor design, it was clear to me that this could revolutionise an important aspect of the Internet users’ experience.”

But it was the sort of product that needed a large company as a partner. They spent too long trying to find one who was willing to pay for it to be a great user experience for their customers.

You need passion to get you through inevitable challenges, but this company also struggled because they cared a little too much. “The founder’s passion for technological innovation drove him to dive down successive rabbit holes of new feature development, leaving no time to get the fundamentals correct,” he says.

It’s never from just one cause, and it happens to so many startups, thanks to timing, funding, poorly defined offerings, under-developed technology, inability to pivot, and sometimes (we hope rarely) founder hubris.

Even though everyone acknowledges that startups fail for multiple reasons, it was tough to find people willing to talk to us for this post. We don’t like to talk about failure except in the abstract. But why?

Why we won’t talk about why startups fail

Before you think it’s an Irish approach to an Irish problem, it’s not. True, there’s a real aversion in Ireland, and it’s certainly not celebrated like it is in Silicon Valley, or light-heartedly addressed like at New York’s Startup Funeral events  (although Startup Funeral has a serious core). Avoiding the F-word is part of startup culture wherever you go.

New York-based Wallaert says it’s everywhere. “It’s the most relentlessly positive community you will ever meet, which is a great thing. You have to be overconfident as hell, but what results is a community that doesn’t talk about failure.”

When you don’t talk about failure, he says, it means that people don’t ask for help when they need it. “I’ve seen the inside of startups where things were on fire, and going terribly, and I see them go out for beers and they’ll say they’re doing great.”

He calls this ‘founders’ disease’. “It’s the complete inability to express authentically the challenges a startup is facing, and the individual is facing.”

It’s not because they’re deliberate liars, or unaware of it. “Startups are partially about appearance – no one is going to sign a deal with someone whose startup is a week away from failure.”

Using the F-word might be the only way to succeed

But if you don’t ask for help, nobody knows there’s room to give it.

“What’s ironic is that’s how things happen,” Wallaert says. “Business deals get made because you say to some friend that things aren’t going well, and that friend says, ‘Hey, I know someone.’ You don’t even have to ask for help, you just have to not lie about your status. People are nice – they want to be nice!”

That’s a feature of startupland: most of its relentlessly positive people don’t want to see anyone fail. They actually like to help.

“Most problems are only solved by someone helping,” he says. “If you could solve them yourself, you would have done it already.”

We know we’ve failed because we’ve usually run out of money, but there’s no one reason for it, just like there’s no standard metric for success — and nobody does it on their own.

In the tech world, startup founders are often quick to credit their teams for success, and blame themselves for failure. They’re right about success not being a solo effort, but the only time a failure is yours alone is when you fail to admit you need a hand.

Apply for NDRC’s accelerator programme LaunchPad here 

How much does personality have to do with it?

You need different personalities involved. If they’re all outgoing hunters, it will be difficult. But by the same token, if they’re all introverts, it will be difficult as well. You need a balance.

I love an extrovert on a team, who is a good presenter, and knows how to work assets like body language, knows how to make people feel comfortable, and is extremely responsive. Somebody who is a good emailer, good at following up, and doesn’t let things slide. They may not add a lot of content, but you need someone who is a very good communicator.

Can you talk a little more about what and how teams need to communicate?

It’s how you communicate transparently, how you convey a sense of urgency, get people to respond even when they’re busy, and how you leverage your relationships – that’s what makes a company get funded or work.

You’ve got to be out there. Of course, I’ve seen founders who are way too much out there — at every event and every conference — so you need results. If you have the team with the extrovert, the only way to empower that person is if there’s a team delivering while they are communicating.

And a good team will be brutally honest with each other. They don’t have to be that way with people outside the company, but within the company, that’s the only way they’re going to get better. If you have a situation where one member is dominating all the others and the feedback is only one way, that’s a recipe for disaster. You need open communication within the team.

What advice would you have for someone looking to build a team? How would you engage people to see if they fit?

I would start by asking what gets them excited. What do they enjoy doing the most? Why are they here? Focus on personal preferences: what makes them excited? That’s the only way you’ll be able to sustain what’s required of a startup – high alignment between with whom you spend your day, and who you are, and what your preferences are as a person.

That’s the big luxury in startupland, that we can decide from the start who we want to work with.

Should you ask people about how they handle challenges?

It’s a very difficult thing to do in a Q&A session. You only get to know people under stress and see how they react to stress. They will only give you the best-case scenario, how they’d like to be seen. And I don’t think that’s going to be how they actually are.

So I would focus on the positive stuff, and on what their interests are. The big ideas, what they think is going to change the world, and how they like to spend their day. Are they a day person or a night person? All of this can make a difference. And then spend a lot of time with them.

See how they react in social media, how responsive they are over emails. Articulate your idea in an email and send it out to see what they think, and see who gets back to you – if they don’t respond it’s probably that they’re not all that interested.

What else should you look for?

You’re also testing around the edges, not just of skills. They might be a great python developer, but you have to pick people who are multitalented and can do several jobs at once. You might have 16 different jobs and three people.

So you might have an introverted developer, but given a couple of hours in the evening, he can actually formulate why his product is better than the competitors’. These are the people I’d be looking for, the ones who can really bring something to the party.

What else do you need to think about when you’re building a team?

Which of the team can actually devote time, and in what quantity. Be realistic about your time. Certain things can be done contractually – things like foundervesting, and what that means for people who want to put together a startup. Figuring out what you do with the fallout when you know it’s not going to work.

Teams that are too big are also not going to work. One of the key metrics for success is whether the team can grow. Can it attract people? If you start with a nucleus of six and then it’s down to two after three months, something is not working. It should go in the other direction. You should start a trio and build it up to an orchestra.

How do you determine ownership on a team?

You have to decide who is a founder and who is an employee. And like I said, chief anything is disastrous – it pigeonholes people and limits ability to move around. You have to have people who are willing to grow, for their job to be 100% different in a year’s time.

On the title issue, conferring the status of founder or cofounder on people is really important. It should be everybody that was doing this full-time at the start for at least six months. You can earn a cofounder title – you can tell someone, “If you start and it works out, I’ll make you a cofounder.” For the lifetime of the startup it’s important because it’s the DNA. You infuse the startup with who you are, with that DNA.

If you’ve got a great idea for a business but need a team, or if you’d like to join a team, but don’t have an idea of your own, find out if our Swequity Exchange might be for you.

Are startups a young man’s game?
Yes, and for a number of reasons. The first thing is that a lot of startups at the moment are tech-focused. Government policies are about rapid growth and export.

If you look at the statistics on female entrepreneurship in Ireland, the vast majority are in services or business support, and they don’t get as much funding as businesses that focus on export. Government policy ensures that this is a young man’s game.

The second policy is parental leave. The only people who get paid leave are women, so who is going to stay at home and mind the kids by default? Discrimination is built in by the lack of parental leave for men.

People in their 20s who can take a risk can be part of it all, but these are two government policies that work against women.

It’s a sweeping generalisation, but women aren’t always risk takers. I thrive on it, but I was very lucky that I had a husband who always supported me, so I could go for it.

When does all of this start?
Keep in mind that the educational system still separates the sexes, and girls are taught home economics while boys are taught engineering.

The fact that we split genders from a young age and we teach them different things means they don’t go into STEM. The vast majority of startups are STEM, export-based, and high-growth, so girls are disadvantaged from the beginning. Female entrepreneurship statistics haven’t changed in the last ten years.

What about outside of Ireland?
If you want to look globally, look at the parental legislation in those countries. Look at the cultural and educational situation. Who gets the education in those high-growth areas? Who can afford to take risks? Who is the main carer where there are children — is it both parents, or is it the mother?

We know that a more diverse team is better, but what are some of the benefits of a gender and age spread in a business?
We can definitely see that businesses improve. Studies of larger businesses show that companies dominated by a male board do more mergers and acquisitions, and are less profitable. Women on boards are more conservative, and the companies end up more profitable.

I believe there needs to be balance in all things. I don’t think it’s good to have an all-female or all-male business. You need a balance of gender and age groups because there’s something to be offered from everybody.

What about in startup-land?
A lot of these businesses, if they are all-male and mostly in their 20s, that business is at an immediate disadvantage. First of all, they won’t have a female perspective if they are selling to a female market. And they don’t have mature business heads. We rush into things when we’re younger. Older people will think our way through the possible moves and permutations, take their time over decisions, and make decisions in a strategic way.

Women are more risk-averse, likely to look at a number of solutions. It can add a bit of calm and reflection to a team. Women are also good at working in a group and getting buy-in from a team. I think women are more concerned about the good of the group.

What advice would you give to a team looking to expand their gender and age spread?
Be a good listener when you diversify your team. Even if you don’t agree, listen and reflect on it, then decide. Don’t bother bringing in new people if you aren’t going to listen to them.

I think it’s really healthy to have divergent views in a company because it makes you stronger. If you can overcome those objections early, you can have a better product, service, or methodology. If you have a group of people around a table who all say “yes”, then that’s completely the wrong team. Strong leaders surround themselves with people who are smarter than them.

We don’t do enough to help entrepreneurs recover. We have incubators coming out of our ears, but what about a recovery system? Entrepreneurs are a valuable resource, but failing is a depressing moment. I’ve done it a few times and there’s no support, and no help — you’re essentially abandoned by the system.

Nobody talks about failure — it’s really the wrong language in Ireland, and has horrible connotations. Saying “embrace failure” is like saying “lick a razor blade” — it sucks. Don’t fail. A better meme than “fail fast” is “learn fast”. Try not to fail, use your mistakes to move the proposition forward and move on.

It’s going to happen to everyone. The lucky ones knock it out of the park the first time.

How has startup culture evolved in the last few years?

I started my first startup in Ireland in 2002. There were four or five enterprise platforms, and there was no equity. They were year-long programmes. And this predates social networking, so you had all of these people working in isolation. Social networking, which really kicked off in 2004/2005, made linking and group forming ridiculously easy.

And then there’s the development of true incubators: Startup Bootcamp, Dogpatch, Launchpad. They have money, and they’re short and aggressive. They get you started and get you some cash to get off the ground.

In 2002 you had nothing to fund your business unless it was friends and family, or you were wealthy. Now if you have an even half-decent idea and some coding ability, you can pick up about 50,000 for free in about ten different places. That’s huge and it broadens the base.

Enterprise Ireland wants a billion-dollar company that goes public and returns lots of cash and creates huge employment. You don’t build that by building one company, you build a base of companies where VCs have successful exits. You start with a million, then 10 million, etc. You’re not going to invest in a company today and it’s a billion dollars tomorrow.

It needs to be a 50- to 100-year vision, and you need to create a lot of entrepreneurs. The more you create (and help them recover when they fail) the more likely you are to get those billion-dollar exits in 20 years’ time. It’s a pyramid: you have to build it from the base up, and not the top down.

What’s the most frustrating aspect of it?

There’s still a funding gap. The early stage funding is pretty much solved – you can get 50 or 100k relatively easily, but there’s still a colossal gap between that and the first 500k to 2 million euro investment, and it’s tricky to cross.

And people don’t understand the cost of building a consumer business. You have to figure about ten dollars per user, and we don’t have the funding structures in place to outperform competitors in the US. A guy in the US is going to raise money faster, and he’s going to outspend you in consumer acquisition.

It’s hard to be competitive in the Irish marketplace – you have to put your CEO somewhere like Silicon Valley. For example, with Intercom.io, Eoghan McCabe raised angel funding. He’s moved to the US, but the engineering team is here. It’s not a consumer product, but it has a lovely viral model and a compelling offering, targeting businesses. It’s a lot easier to sell to enterprise because they have more money to spend, and you need fewer customers to make your targets.

And what’s the most exciting?

What’s really exciting are businesses emerging in the last four or five years: Orchestra and Engine Yard, Intercom. And then people like Robin Blandford, with Decisions for Heroes, which is a service for emergency response teams, and has this clever vertical marketing. There’s also WhatClinic, which is a medical clinic search. It’s had seven quarters of growth, they’re hiring in Dublin, and they’re making a profit – WhatClinic doesn’t even need investment anymore.

What do you think startups in Ireland need most right now?

The thing that people are worst at is customer acquisition. That means managing, costing, analyzing and understanding how customers get acquired. You need to know which cohorts will give you money, and which one are kicking the tires.

Who is the team behind the idea?

I teach creative technology at Coleg Harlech. I studied Design in Education at Bangor and was originally going to be a secondary school teacher, but I enjoyed the design stuff more than the teaching.

And we have Jack Robinson, one of the top student skiers in Wales. He’s also a member of my university canoe club, and just a very keen all-rounder. He helps to get content into the website. There’s Nicky Rudd, our kitesurfer, who is currently second in the UK in the BKSA. She’s a coach, and she helps us make sure what we do is inclusive. She’s really well-connected and you couldn’t wish to meet a nicer person — she helps develop the content side of the website.

And there’s Dan Hayworth, a whitewater kayaker. He looks at our whitewater content and checks how worthwhile it is, but he’s also a bit of an ambassador. He gets people involved in the site and tries to introduce new groups and people into it. He’s a retired scientist who used to work for 3M. He retired at 35 to go kayaking around the world.

How did you come to be involved with Inventorium?

Our offices are based in the Ty Menai space, the offices formerly known as CAST. Our building manager was Caroline Thompson. She looked after us and was a business mentor as well; she helped guide us all a lot. Then Inventorium came in and Caroline moved into that. When we decided to develop Xsportmap it was really new for us because while we had developed websites for contract work, this was our first project. We knew it was an innovative idea, but we didn’t know what to do. So we went up to Inventorium and Caroline helped us develop a business plan. She pointed us in directions we needed to go, and that’s taken us to where we are now.

At what stage is Xsportmap now?

We’re about to spin it out into a new company. We’ve had chats with one potential investor, and  we’re about to approach another one as well. What we’re looking to do at the moment is bring in a partner who potentially can help us extend our industry contacts and help with marketing. And if we can, find some financial investment to help the company grow. At the moment it’s all off our own backs, all sweat equity. We’re proud of our extended team, of all the people who’ve put time into helping the project grow.

What’s your vision for the future?

We just want to keep it growing. The position we’re in at the moment is that we’d like to completely open the system, so that everyone can just share information, similar to a Wikipedia philosophy. We’d like to see everyone sharing knowledge freely, sharing experiences — “I just went to this beach and it’s fantastic” or  “I just paddled this river and it was the greatest experience of my life.”

We’ll never compete with facebook, but extreme sports people are a special kind of enthusiast. They put their lives on the line to follow a sport that can be really dangerous. It breeds an individual kind of person and we’d like to have a forum where those experiences can be shared with the whole world.

What have you learned that has surprised you?

From what we drew out on a white board to what we’ve ended up with has been very different. Social networks is such a complex piece of mathematics. How people join and interact — you can’t predict it, and we’ve tried to roll with the punches and develop in directions that communities have wanted. And you can’t predict how it’s going to grow. What we planned and what it’s turned into is really different. It’s amazing how organic these things are. If you try to force it down a specific route, which we did — and got wrong. We had to completely change plans at one point, but it’s probably better than we’d originally planned.